'Color for the eye, color for the ear' : music, metaphor and meaning in Joni Mitchell's Blue

Through a diversified career spanning nearly four decades, Joni Mitchell has reached an acknowledged status as a musician, composer, lyricist, painter and singer. Her 1971 album Blue is often seen as her seminal work, and regarded as an outstanding example of self-searching singer-songwriter craft of the period. In this thesis, I have sought to illuminate important themes of Mitchell s work as manifested through the use of conceptual metaphor in words and music. Through my analyses of the songs selected, Blue , A Case of You and River , I have shown how voice, melody, harmony, instrumentation as well as metaphors collaborate to communicate affective and cognitive meaning. Emotions mediated through metaphors related to travel and liquids centre on the main themes of DISRUPTION/AMBIVALENCE, echoing tensions inherent in opposite themes of STABILITY/ INSTABILITY and RELATIONAL INTIMACY/ INDEPENDENCE. The imagery associated with travel and liquid is prominent throughout Mitchell s lyrics and this is effected through her use of metaphors, as well as being underpinned and illustrated by her musical devices. Images of the ocean, a river, blood, wine and ink are metaphorically related to a flow of fluids with no fixed border and are connoted musically by hovering melodies, ambiguous modes and a flexible and intuitive vocal style. Roaming around in Europe with no set itinerary suggests a restless soul urging onwards, thriving on change. A specific type of the LIFE IS A JOURNEY metaphor, the image of travel pervades the album both literally and figuratively, and this sense of disruptive instability seems to underline the intense allure of melancholy on the album. The songs selected provided a rich web of meanings, which also promoted the intertextual activation of other songs by Mitchell, as well as other cultural artefacts